Recently, classroom-based foreign language learning, particularly as practiced in Europe, hasbegun moving from a focus on teaching for communicative competence to teaching forintercultural communicative competence. Like communicative competence, interculturalcommunicative competence includes the knowledge and abilities needed to participate incommunicative activities in which the target language is the primary communicative code and insituations where it is the common code for those with different preferred languages. It alsoincludes cognitive and affective skills and behaviors needed to engage in unfamiliar encounterswith culturally different interlocutors, to negotiate one's cultural identities in light ofone's roles in these encounters, and to understand the norms and assumptions underlyingthe various communicative activities on one's own terms.